Re: Is Interbase still thriving?

One thing you forgot to mention is that for 99 percent of internally developed projects at "most" corporations, there is absolutely no reason to waste money on Oracle, MS SQL server or any of the others.

I would say MySQL is the mid level winner in terms of popularity, but the clear winner for overall performance,scalability and features is Postgresql 8.x

Postgresql is fast approaching the feature set of Oracle and it is a piece of cake to setup and maintain, and it has a excellent "native" win32 port.

You can do things in Postgresql, you simply cannot do in Firebird/Interbase or Mysql.

Need lots of built in functions? no problem Postgresql has them all and you don't need a UDF.

Need great documentation? Then check out http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/index.html

Need Multi version concurrency transactions?  covered again.

Need temp tables?  covered.

Need point in time recovery?  covered

Need tablespaces?  covered

Need the ability to write procs/functions in the language of your choice? covered again. (java,perl,ruby,php,tcl,python,plpgsql + more)

There are also no dialects in Postgres and you can simply use any sql you want in procs/functions, there is no PSQL or DSQL as in interbase/firebird. In Interbase/Firebird you have to use EXECUTE to run a lot of common SQL in procs.

Want commercial support? then you can use companies such as Pervasive or
DBEnterprise.


I also like Firebird, but once I tried Postgresql, there was no going back.


The battle at the top: Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase,
Informix (swallowed by IBM)... Winner: MS SQL Server

The battle in the middle: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird,
Interbase, JDataStore, IBM Cloudspace
Winner: MySQL

The battle on Desktop: MS Access, DBASE, Foxpro(?), ... and
                      a whole bunch others in obscurities.
                  Winner: MS Access

Overall Winner: Microsoft. 


--
Tony Caduto
http://www.amsoftwaredesign.com
Home of PG Lightning Admin for Postgresql 8.x
.

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